I just wanted to speak on the regulated professions' point of view on this. You heard the word “harmonization” said I don't know how many times in my script and in the other script. That's because that's kind of the crux of the issue here--that the professions are regulated provincially.

A lot of the work we've done was to bring everyone around the same table, to have everyone using the common tools. It really sounds like a no-brainer, but it isn't. It's complex. It's difficult. These bodies have been given the obligation to regulate their profession. They have to meet a certain provincial standard. They're not going to give that up, and neither should they. They're required by law to do so. So a lot of the work was to bring folks together, to get people to agree on common tools, and have people build from there. To even try to think there could be only one single entry point...it just won't happen.

Before I ask my next question, I was just wondering if there were any other interjections from anyone else with respect to improvements that need to be made to the program. We heard how the program has been benefiting, or what direction you're going in, but how can the recommendations be improved?

We certainly are now really fully employed. What it's done so far is to help build capacity in our own organization to do this kind of work. We wouldn't have been able to do that without the program. We've had a very generous contribution toward doing that. We need to work on that.

I was very fortunate to be part of a workshop in Melbourne, Australia, earlier this year on this topic. We brought together Australians and Canadians to look at the problems. Not all the players, as I said to Mr. Wilson, were at the table. The employers need to be at the table.

I think that's the work going forward--to bring people together. I think that's going to be the key. Once every group has their tools out there, then how do you make them work, how do you keep them current, and how do you bring everyone as part of the equation together? That would be our main recommendation.

I want to ask Mr. Wilson what he thinks about this situation. I myself have the impression that the employers' requirements are often too specific.

I want to share the example of the biochemist who drove me from the station to Parliament in his old taxi cab. He is a biochemist from a Middle Eastern country. He taught at a university in Italy. He must have a certain level of expertise. In Canada, he drives a cab for Blue Line. He told me that, whenever he tried to find a job in his profession, workplace experience in Canada was required.

I wonder where we are headed with such requirements. No one will be able to satisfy those criteria.

I agree with everything you said. The work experience is a real problem. A lot of times companies are restricted from hiring those individuals to get the work experience because they can't get the certification. It all loops around, unfortunately. That's why I said in my remarks that it's so important to look beyond the academic standards in a lot of these professions and look towards the real, tangible trades.

I'm not talking about accountants or doctors. I'm talking about welders and sheet fitters—real, tangible hard skills that people have. We need to be able to find a way to get around the academic credentials in a lot of these and look at the hard skills themselves so that they can be at least put into some type of apprenticeship program so they can get those without having to start from ground zero, which is typically the case today.

Both the accounting groups have done an exciting prospect of going right across Canada with their qualifications. It can't have been easy. What was the process, and how did you manage to get all the provincial associations on board to actually make that happen? Clearly, worker mobility is one of the big issues we have to face. We have nearly 1.7 million unemployed and the ability for them to move across Canada would be one way of assisting in reducing the numbers of unemployed.

From the point of view of the CA profession, we've had complete Canadian mobility for a very long time. The government's structure of the profession focuses on those kinds of national standards, provincially implemented. Every CA in Canada writes the same exam at the same time. Everybody works towards the same goal. We have a protocol agreement with the provincial institutes. All major decision-making is on that basis.

To give you an idea, for the international credential work that we're doing right now for the portal, and as we work forward with the other projects, we literally took the leading expert in that area, in the provinces that have the most immigration. We put them together in a room. We looked at the processes they had. We shared everything and we came up together with a process that worked for everybody. That's how we do it.

I'd say there is a real incentive for all provincial bodies to work together. We have a national qualification program. We have the same national exams from coast to coast to coast. We have the same educational requirements. For the largest numbers of years, within the CGA profession, we've had full mobility.

Let's look at it from the perspective of someone who's foreign-trained or comes into Canada under one of our MRAs, our mutual recognition agreements. If you take an individual who's achieved his ACCA designation from India, for example, and arrives in British Columbia, once he's accepted, once he becomes a CGA , that individual will have full mobility in every province of Canada, with the exception of public accounting; there is still restricted mobility into Ontario on the public accounting issue. On accounting, within the CGA organization, they have full mobility.

I wasn't at the table when that was negotiated a long time ago, over ten years ago. There was a real motivation to do it, because these are timely and costly processes. Since we have the national uniform standards qualification program, it was quite easy to get together.

I don't mean to put you on the spot, Mr. Wilson, but from a manufacturing and exporting point of view, that doesn't seem to exist within your organization in terms of getting a pan-Canadian standards set, either at the trades level, at the technologists and technicians level, or at the engineering level. Are you working on it? Do you plan to work on it?

We'd like to work on it, I guess I would say. We're actually trying to look at some of the models that have been developed out of the human resources sector councils. The automotive human resources sector council, in particular, has done some great work on skill certification matching. They're not looking at titles, they are looking more at functional equivalencies of jobs.

We're actually starting to work with them right now. What we would like to do is use the work they have done and expand it outside of automotive and bring in more sector councils to create a pan-Canadian approach to some of this to start breaking down some of these barriers. Even simple things like the job title can sometimes make a difference in who can compete for the job, even though the actual skills are the same. The answer is yes, it's a problem, yes, we want to do more, and maybe we can through the human resources sector councils.